OoC: Evening, BA. Welcome to The Frozen Masquerade, where nightmares are made real and illusions lure into oblivion the weak and the strong alike. Who can resist that melodic whisper?

A basic outline out the RP is as follows: Participating characters will first discover and enter a snowbound mansion, where they are invited, by its owner, to partake in a feast and follow it up with hours of dancing and entertainment. Rooms for the night are afterward offered; darkness closes in. But the next morning does not come. Rather, your character’s nightmares, made material, come in morning's place.

Your objective? To escape the house. Team up, go at it alone; only break free of the mansion before the illusions swallow you alive. How will that be accomplished? Howsoever you desire or think an appropriate motivation to keep your character moving, ;-)

As Masquerade is now up to 13 participants, I will no longer be accepting character submissions. Please refer to The Frozen Masquerade's Out of Character Thread for further details and posting order.

Happy posting!

IC:

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci


His conscious mind cannot remember the Beginning - if ever there was a beginning - nor does it remember the Before - if ever there was a before. It only remembers the dancing in the long, golden hall, the tables sagging with the weight of a thousand dishes and a wealth of silver. The dancing, the dishes, the silver: these are the beginning, the middle, the end, the before, the after. He is even starting to forget the woman who brought him here.

But if he concentrates, visions of himself in an old and yellowed smock, holding a shepherd's crook in his left hand, surface in his mind's eye. He sometimes remembers the heat of a summer afternoon, and how he laid himself in the cool grass and waited for the wind to brush his face.

And then there is the touch of her hand upon his cheek, her skin as cold as well water. He opens his eyes and she smiles down at him. He is taken by that first glance. He stares at her, as men stare at a god made manifest, and she slips to her feet, fluid as water, saying, "Come."

He comes, leaving his shepherd's staff and his shepherd’s self behind.

He remembers next the white stone bridge over which she took him, the mansion they entered. They walked down a wainscoted corridor and emerged in the eating hall; he admired the lofty ceiling and vast, marble floor, dotted with food-laden tables. She fed him from these sunken tables and silver dishes, then caught up his hands and pulled him into a dance. He remembers how he could not breathe for the ecstasy that swelled his gut, how the yule marble burned under his feet, how his legs weakened and his heels finally bled.

And he remembers too how she danced with him, gripping his sweaty hands with such strength his fingers turned purple in the earthlight, and how she smiled and laughed and held him to her when his legs gave out and he skittered in his own blood across the marble. "No, no, no, no, no, my love; stop now and you shall die!" she cried. "Dance, dance, or give me up and die a mortal's death!" And he remembers how the threat was like a lance through his belly, the thought of losing her, and so he scrambled after her, hauling himself upright, dancing, dancing, dancing so that she would not leave him.

His memory passes in blurs of light and circles of dancing, day in and day out. Sometimes he remembers how she plied him with candies and biscuits and thin milk, to which she would add sugar crystals. But after this he remembers nothing, only the lights and the dancing. So much dancing. His feet still bear the scars.

And then the moment when she said, "Do not follow me. Please." His vision had been bleary and swimming and he could not understand; he stumbled after her when she sailed from the hall. She passed into the golden foyer, beneath the pillared arches, and she ascended the stairs. He tried to follow. But he was drunk and sick with the sweet food and wild dance; he staggered on the steps and fell down them.

And when he woke up, she was gone.

It came to him, as he lay stretched at the foot of the stairs, that the earthlight that had lit the mansion was also gone and that he lay in darkness on a heap of broken tile. Dust coated his tongue, filled his nostrils and brain; he tasted rot and dank air. He twisted to his knees and came to his feet; he stretched out a hand and found the staircase: it was shattered and overgrown with fungus. The banisters had rotted away and floor beneath him was broken up as if with a pickaxe. He stumbled from the foyer into the dancing hall, drew back the damp curtains of a window, and saw beyond the soiled glass nothing but white upon white upon white. He looked at the cracks in the frame and saw the white piled in its corners was snow.

He ran, after this, like a man insane, stumbling where no traces of the sickly light from the outside gleamed, looking for some sign of life, some portal of escape. He did not know the name of the woman who had brought him here, but he screamed for her all the same. And when she did not answer, and his screams had chafed his throat raw, and the blisters on his feet opened and left blood in his wake, he huddled in the murk and silence and sobbed.

It took many days—or perhaps it was many years; he did not know these things anymore, not since time had frozen—it took him many days before he accepted that he would never set foot beyond the white stone bridge that led to—and from—the mansion. It took even longer for him to accept that he would never see the woman herself again. He combed the mansion in search of her and found only disused rooms and spider webs thick as cotton, rotten timbers and caved in walls, dust deep as a fishpond.

He started to question her existence, and after that, his own sanity.

An affinity with the mansion began to fill him, for surely, he reasoned, the mansion was enchanted just as he had been enchanted; surely it was damned, just as he was damned, to live without time and company. “But I shall be your company,” he said out loud, one day, to the great ceiling to the eating hall. “I shall be your society, your friend. And perhaps, if we are lucky, more friends will join us. And will not that splendid? We will make them eat with us, and dance with us, and stay with us for all time…”